I've had a few people ask me how the knitting stitch markers work since you can't unclip them from your yarn. (The answer is, they never attach to the yarn). So, I thought I'd show you how I used them for an unfinished hat project I recently found while looking for yarn to start a new project.

As you can see in the photos, I wanted to do 4 decreases per round for the top of the hat, so I separated all my stitches into 4 sections. It may not look like much here, but before I started decreasing there were significantly more stitches than I wanted to keep track of by the power of my mind alone.

Every time I came up to a stitch marker, I passed it over to the right hand needle then did a decrease (K2TOG). When I finished and pulled out my cable and needles, the stitch markers dropped off as well. 

Advantages to using stitch markers:

• Each stitch marker reminds me when to decrease
• I can watch TV while knitting because I don't have to pay attention to counting stitches
• When I forget anyway and keep on knitting past the stitch marker, I only have to undo back to the marker instead of trying to count stitches and figure out what happened and where I went wrong
• Using shiny beautiful stitch markers makes the occasional tedium of knitting more exciting because I see them coming up and think "oooh, look at that, it's so cute!" 

This lovely hat was created using the pattern from the North Shore Sweater by Tin Can Knits. I chose four of my Ocean Waters stitch markers to add some bling while knitting.

Expert modelling was provided by Batman Bear, with an owl stuffy bravely volunteering to round out the top of the hat.